A Visit to an Iraqi Bread Shop

by Michael Y. Park

on 02/02/12 at 09:00 AM

So as I mentioned a couple weeks back, I spent three weeks recently in the northern part of Iraq, the mostly autonomous region known as Iraqi Kurdistan. While walking down a street in downtown Hawler (aka Erbil or Arbil) one morning, my friend Mark and I were beckoned in by the guys in a bakery, who asked me to take their photo.

They were making the little triangular breads called samoun that are an essential part of every meal there. Instead of the word "bakery" or pictures of bakers in toques, sandwich shops there will sometimes advertise themselves simply with painted signs of yellow diamonds that are automatically understood to be symbols for samoun.

Anyway, after I snapped a pic of the bakers, they invited us in to see how they made their bread. Here's what I saw ....

First they pressed the blobs of dough into thin diamonds, then laid out the thin diamonds of dough into wooden pallets, making indentations all over the surface with their fingertips ....

Then, with a motion I can best describe as magic (and I mean 100-percent Harry Potter-style enchantment, Gandalf-level stuff), the head baker picked up a loooong wooden paddle that had obviously seen years of regular use, flicked his wrist, and somehow (magic!) made the row of hand-sized diamonds appear on the top of the paddle in perfect order. It's like he telepathically barked an order, and the little soldiers marched on top, except so quickly that my mortal mind perceived it as him doing some fancy slidey thing I will never, ever be able to learn.

Then into the oven the diamonds went, sliding onto the hot tile like a fresh pizza.

Did I mention how looooong the paddle was already? Yes? Good.

After a couple minutes of joshing around with us while being mutually incomprehensible, the chef popped the paddle back into the oven and pulled out a row of brown diamonds where there'd been dough before. Yes, I know it looks like he's about to climb in here and sacrifice himself to the baking gods, but he was doing something else. I just could not for the life of me figure out what it was.

In the end, my friend Mark and I walked away with two handfuls of fresh baked samoun, and the best breakfast we had the entire trip.